Judith Ivory by Beast

Author:Beast [Beast]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2012-04-25T15:36:06+00:00

Chapter 16

The ancient Chinese named ambergris “dragon’s spittle perfume, “ because they believed it came from the mouths of dragons who, while sleeping upon rocks at the edge of the sea, drooled this fragrant substance down into the ocean.

Charles Harcourt, Prince d’Harcourt

On the Nature and Uses of Ambergris

Louise managed an amazing feat. She glided through her first eight or so hours in France without contemplating her future husband, barely looking at him in fact for more than a few seconds at a time. She was able to keep him—his tall, long-coated presence—at the periphery of her awareness. Which, considering, every moment of these eight hours had been by his arrangement, at the expense of his hospitality, and. like her future itself, dependent on his goodwill, was a fairly daring act of neglect on her part.

It was just that he seemed so bizarre, so unpredicted, she simply didn’t have the energy to make sense of him; not yet.

And there was so much else going on. At the hotel. she found herself dropped straight into a midday garden party of almost two hundred people, most of them strangers. Overwhelmed (and exhausted from lack of sleep), she barely saw any of these people, most of whom seemed content that she simply smile and look pretty—the easy trick she’d performed for most of her life.

Beyond this, when Louise’s mind had any clarity or focus, it tended to drift into thoughts of her Pasha Charles, of how and where he had gone off to so quickly. Was he here in Marseilles? Or was he on another boat already, crossing the sea to his home?

Louise stole glimpses toward this sea over rooftops, between heads and shoulders, over trayfuls of local delicacies: wedges of chickpea pancakes, raw vegetables dipped in some sort of herb-fragrant, creamy-thick condiment, and fresh ripe olives that she thought at first were rolled in salt but, when she bit into one, discovered to be rolled instead in grain-fine garlic. Manger sur le pouce, her strange, black-haired host called it. To eat on the thumb. Snacks. Most of these novel tastes were strong to her palate.

Her Charles, again he’d been right: France was interesting but boggling on first acquaintance. She felt lost in among so much newness, even when it came to something so simple as getting her hunger satisfied. She couldn’t imagine the bother of doing anything more complicated. Nothing was as it was back home.

In greeting, everyone kissed everyone else, including men kissing men sometimes on both cheeks. The carriages looked different. They seemed lighter, quicker. Automobiles, though only a few here, were faster and louder than the ones in New York; there were slightly more of them. French toilets were also louder; they flushed violently and were in their own room, separate from the bath. And the new, like motor-carriages and flushing toilets, lived side by side with an old Louise was unaccustomed to. From the coach on their way up the ridge to the hotel, she’d glimpsed steep, narrow streets that seemed of another century entirely.

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